How perfectly insipid. It's like Martha Stewart, but for news. Is it bad of me to feel like this is meant to work as news for women? Relatedly, my father used to insist that the news should be entirely about people who died. Dying being such a profoundly important matter. As long as anyone has died — and there's never a day when no one dies (if there was, would we notice?) — that's what the news should focus on. I tried to say, but wouldn't that be monotonous? It's banal, isn't it? Why not report that people are breathing? The real question is: What are people doing that's different and important now, not who did something in the past that makes it seem significant that he has now died? It's that thing, that for the newly dead makes us care that he has now died, that we should be learning about now. No, whatever that thing was, death is bigger. Death is the news. The news for men.

Newspapers, in their feature section meetings, have always talked about having the need for happy news. This is no different. And the problem always was that happy news isn't very interesting and that conflict, as it does in fiction, makes non-fiction interesting.

It's about advertising. Good news kinds of stories are much easier to generate from a press release.

If a company knows it can get some favorable press once in a while from a press release, it's more inclined to bump up its ad spend.

I looked at that, too, when I was a media buyer. Ads and favorable editorial have synergy. But loading ads up in a media outlet that's trashing the client in their pages was a waste of money.

The 'good news' section will help subsidize everything else.

Plus, if you can determine that one section of your site has 90 percent women viewers, and the rest of it is 50/50, you can place ads accordingly, and improve your click through rate.

I don't care for that kind of news, most of the time (unless it's about military people and families), but I don't mind it. The Internet is a big place, and at least it's not another dating advice blog with a 22 year old sex columnist.

The whole "good news" thing is just more pretentious leftwing horseshit. They'll trumpet any advance of socialism or winning the freedom for some communist terrorist from the 60s as "good news". Tax cuts and more freedom from government will always be "bad news" unless a union or a minority is involved.